Woken up this morning by the sound a fan running continuously. Damn, can't Yvonne turn the extractor off when she's finished showering? But no, it
proved to be coming from lagoon, Yvonne's computer. It had rebooted round 7:56, and
she tells me that there had been a power failure round that time. teevee had also
rebooted, but was not making any noise. Both machines seemed to be running normally.

First question: what power failure? Nothing else had reported a failure. The ones that did
were on the external UPS. And in the course of the morning it experienced many hiccoughs,
causing my office UPS (one of the clients) to beep annoyingly, sometimes more than once a
minute. Somehow this UPS was a bad purchase. My guess is that the hiccoughs are caused by
mains power fluctuations that don't interest any other consumers, but cause it to interrupt
briefly. Maybe there was a particular sequence at 7:53 or so that caused it to interrupt
the supply long enough for teevee, lagoon and Yvonne's clock to lose power.

That doesn't explain the fan, of course. How do I stop it? Shut down and reboot? Did
that, and the fan started all over again. OK, power down, pull the power plug and wait a
while, then try again? That made a difference. It didn't power up again, though it made
some kind of a noise through the sound output: click-click every 5 seconds or so.

OK, time for a replacement for lagoon. Took the disk and put it in my only remaining
test box, and had almost no issues getting it up and running: I had expected at least some
problems with the display card parameters. The only issue was one that I have seen before,
that the network card didn't come up in time for
the NFS mounts, so I had to
retry them in multi-user mode.

So what's the issue with the old lagoon? It's
a ThinkCentre M 6073. Any help on
the web? Yes, indeed. A Google search thinkcentre loud fan brought a number of hits, some, like this one with specific instructions on how to fix it, even down to the motherboard
layout. Only that's a different motherboard, and on mine I couldn't find the CMOS jumper
mentioned. OK, tuit queue: for the moment Yvonne has a computer.

As if that wasn't bad enough, got a call from CJ Ellis: he had run into the dreaded
corrupted content
error bug. Put him off to the afternoon, by which time he had solved it: one of the
connectors to his ATA was not seated correctly, and after he put it back in, the problem had
gone away.

I still can't get my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II to autofocus reliably for video. Most of today's clips
were OK, but one was spectacularly bad:

Yes, it's trying to tell me to clean the dust off the lens. But why does it get so
completely confused, and what can I do about it? It started off in focus and just wandered
off into nirvana. If the upcoming E-M1X model is better, I might even forgive it for its
ridiculous size.

I've been paying particular attention to mites on
my curry tree, and it seems to be
paying off: it's looking a lot happier. But today, while drawing the curtains, I saw a
tell-tale web on one of the healthy shoots. Out with the fly spray, and discovered that
there were many such webs. Here they are after spraying:

Took a lot of photos today. The videos accounted for 7.4 GB, an amazing amount for the 15
minutes or so that I took. And while reading in from my 32 GB SD card, I ran an mdir
-s to show all files. The summary was interesting:

474 files 7 204 379 128 bytes
14 164 066 304 bytes free

That doesn't add up to 32 GB! But it also doesn't match what I read in:

So what's wrong with lagoon? The obvious thing to do is to try to repair it. But
these second-hand ThinkCentres hardly
cost anything, and maybe it will make more sense to buy a “new” one.

Off looking on eBay, running into the same
problems as on previous
occasions: how do I know how fast the thing is? Some of the advertised systems don't
even specify what the processor is. The ones that do don't give any idea of the relative
performance, and not even the price is an indication.

What I found today was:

Model

CPU

Price+shipping

CPUMark

Comment

M71e

i5-2400

150+30

5962

M92p

i5-3470

165+24

3717

M81 FAST

CORE DUAL G620

189

2028

M81 FAST

CORE DUAL G6320

2377

Core 2 duo (e7500)

1875

i5-4590

7310

only tiny

M73

i5-4570

225

7131

4570t? (2.9 GHz)

6794?

Yes, it's incomplete, but it might help. One issue is that the more powerful processors are
in smaller cases, and they will probably not take a display card. I might just go for the
i5-2400 again, the same one as in dischord.

Still, even that is significantly cheaper than what I have been looking at. What does the
freezer compartment look like? Surprise, surprise! They're not telling! There are four
images, none of which show what's in the freezer compartment:

Where are the other photos? One is the left half of this photo, another the right half, and
the third (only on some pages) is the right half without content. No idea what the freezer
compartment is like. You'd really think that they don't want to sell the things.

Still, it's becoming clear that our search isn't over yet.

This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
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